Santorum vs. Paul

Rand Paul’s brand doesn’t line up with all of what our party stands for—on national security, social values, the economy and the role of government in society. His message won’t ultimately lead us to be a more successful party.

It’s not news that Santorum isn’t a fan of Rand Paul. He loathes libertarianism or anything that might be mistaken for libertarianism, and his contempt for Sen. Paul’s father during the 2012 primaries was impossible to miss. Santorum is a useful source if one wants to know what an adherent of unreconstructed Bushism thinks of Paul, but I’m not sure that he “lines up” with most Republicans better on many issues than Paul does. Santorum’s assessment of the internal politics of the GOP would have made sense in 2004, but it doesn’t hold up very well now.

On foreign policy, Santorum and Paul are virtually polar opposites inside the GOP, so it’s fair to say that neither represents a majority of the party. However, Santorum represents the fraction of the GOP that looks back on the Bush years and sees a foreign policy that wasn’t aggressive and combative enough. There’s no question that the party and the country are moving in the other direction, and they have been moving in that direction to get away from the disastrous views of hard-liners just like Santorum. Most Republicans may not agree with Sen. Paul entirely on foreign policy, but the Republican constituency for the aggressive foreign policy Santorum supports is the smallest it has been in over a decade.

On social issues, Santorum is still probably closer to what most in the party believe, but the differences here shouldn’t be exaggerated. Paul isn’t the culture warrior Santorum is, but he is still enough of a social conservative to put off some moderates and libertarians. To the extent that Santorum and Paul differ on “the economy and the role of government in society,” Paul is usually more representative of most conservatives. In practice, Santorum had no serious objections to the expanding role of government in the Bush years, and he had absolutely no objections to increasing government powers in the name of national security. It’s true that most Republicans also aren’t in favor of reducing the size and role of government as much as Paul would prefer, but Santorum’s “big government conservatism” has been tried and rejected as a dead end.

Santorum joined the establishment forces in backing Rand Paul’s opponent in the 2010 primary. The primary voters decided Rand Paul was the conservative choice. He carried the social conservatives with the help of James Dobson who switched his support when he realized that Rand’s opponents were lying when they said he was pro choice. I predict that Rand will do well with social conservatives once again in 2016.

On foreign policy, Rand is less hawkish than his party, but primary voters usually don’t vote on foreign policy. In the circles in which I travel, the two most popular Republicans are Rand Paul and Marco Rubio. Few seem to realize how different they are in their foreign policy views.

Rick Santorum favors endless war and fantastic expenditure on war and weapons. Lunacy.

As John le Carre said in The New York Times magazine April 21st: a fraction of what the US & UK spent on war would, if put into explaining the position of the US and UK, would have achieved more than the wars accomplished. [Paraphrase]

Rand Paul, like his father, is a strict constitutionalist, and believes that power to pass social legislation is among those reserved to the States, which should be allowed to set and enforce the policies the people of each state demand, free from interference by Congress, the President or the Federal Courts. If Rick Santorum can’t live with that, he has no business calling himself a conservative.

With the greatest respect, I can’t agree with this summary as regards Santorum’s appeal to Republican primary voters on foreign policy. A hawkish angle is never going to be a negative for Santorum; at best he wouldn’t lose any voters. Republicans only demur on aggressiveness in the foreign policy arena when it’s a Democratic President doing it. If Santorum wants to make ‘Bomb Iran’ a key message in 2016, Daily Kos and the DNC may denounce him. You will wait in vain for RedState and the RNC to do so. As for social conservatism, Santorum has a lot more experience in projecting that than Paul.

In conclusion, Santorum may not be the R nominee in 2016, but Paul won’t be, and there really isn’t any evidence to suggest otherwise.

Noting that he had been “even more hawkish” during this time period than President Bush, Santorum later said, “Maybe that wasn’t the smartest political strategy, spending the last few months running purely on national security”

Santorum lost his Senate seat to Bob Casey Jr., receiving 41% of the vote to Casey’s 59%.

Most Republicans may not agree with Sen. Paul entirely on foreign policy….

But if he doesn’t pander to the other pole of the Republican party, he might well draw enough independents and Democrats to win a national election (especially against, say, Hillary Clinton). Santorum wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance.

The only question is whether the powers that be in the national Republican party want to win an election, or would prefer to keep stringing along their big paymasters and their safe base of grassroots donors for another election cycle before they retire.

Are you TeaParty or are you Libertarian? The two are not equivalent, and I am deeply troubled that the Ron Paul/Libertarians – who are neither “conservative” nor “Tea Party” by any conventional measure – persistently masquerade as something they’re not.

The video you cite was Santorum’s clear refutation not of “Tea Party” principles, but of Libertarian philosophy: their dogmatic, absurd embrace of the “Right to Privacy”, so that polygamy, prostitution, incest, drug use and the like would be “constitutionally protected”; their naive world view that would re-alter the world balance of power; their rejection of central banking; and their bizarre embrace of “back to nature” anarchy.

Clearly, anyone informed and viewing Santorum’s speech in context would know that, but, again, the Libertarians – as usual – lie about their actual objectives and masquerade about what their movement actually is.

“We Tea Party Patriots” my eye. You’re a Libertarian. And I say that as a Robert Taft/Edmund Burke conservative.

@Gerry
Discounting left libertarians, most libertarians embrace states rights. Your assertion that social trends such as polygamy would be constitutionally protected under some overarching “right to privacy” is wrong. If you believe that the federal government should be enforcing your moral and economic system on everyone in the country, you are no conservative. In the context of US politics, conservatives and libertarians are natural allies, and it is possible to be both.

But Mr. Larison “big government conservatism” is a bit of a straw man. What Santorum was inching toward is a Republican Party more in sync with the struggles of working class Americans and not simply the “job creators”. There is a concern about the increasing wage stagnation and lack of upward mobility for a big chunk of American workers. No, there was not alot a policy substance there, but he at least said some things that needed to be said.

Rand Paul’s policy ideas are either irrelevant to this (neo- confederate “constitutionalism”) or (gold standard, big spending cuts, and more tax cuts for the wealthy) would make living standards for many worse.

I don’t get the love for Rand Paul at all. Wonderful that he’s finally challenging the neo-con establishment on foreign policy. But on everything else there’s alot to be desired.

I would echo what Selvar said, that most Ron Paul supporters, like Dr. Paul, are devoted to strict constitutionalism rather than using the Fourteenth Amendment to create “constitutional rights” that don’t exist in the text. If we oppose many laws social conservatives tend to support it is because the Constitution doesn’t give Congress any authority to enact them, and because (like most drug laws) in practice they tend to exacerbate the problems they wish to correct.

As to claiming the Tea Party label, I would remind you that it was the Ron Paul campaign which adopted it in 2007 on the anniversary of the original Boston Tea Party in order to promote Paul’s first great “money bomb” which rocked the political establishment of both parties. No one in the Paul campaign sold or gave the right to use that name to those war-mongering pseudo small government conservatives who posed as “born again” lovers of liberty after Obama’s election. These interlopers certainly can’t deny those who continue to follow Ron Paul and promote his ideals from continuing to use it.

The fact that this guy’s word carries any weight at all, or that anybody pays attention to him in the slightest, is just reflective of how bereft the GOP is of any direction or original thought. Time to make way and push the Santorums and Gingriches to the sidelines.

” Actually, I’m registered Republican, A Constitutional Conservative and a member of The Valley Forge Tea Party Patriots, which are under the umbrella group Tea Party Patriots,the largest Tea Party umbrella group. We have many Dr.Ron Paul supporters in our meetings.

By the way,

Ronald Reagan,
” If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals–if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.

Now, I can’t say that I will agree with all the things that the present group who call themselves Libertarians in the sense of a party say, because I think that like in any political movement there are shades, and there are libertarians who are almost over at the point of wanting no government at all or anarchy. I believe there are legitimate government functions. There is a legitimate need in an orderly society for some government to maintain freedom or we will have tyranny by individuals. The strongest man on the block will run the neighborhood. We have government to insure that we don’t each one of us have to carry a club to defend ourselves. But again, I stand on my statement that I think that libertarianism and conservatism are traveling the same path.”

@Selmar
Paulist Libertarians are by no means “conservative.” Their embrace of states rights isn’t in the Constitutional sense; it is in the political sense. That is, the Palists hope to radically alter conventional American mores of society,family, and behavior, piecemeal, state-by-state, to usher in a radically new “normal” to the entire United States, one state and one region at a time. They are ultimately American Jacobins who would usher in legal drug abuse, polygamy, gay “marriage”, and similar absurdities. Ultimately, they would balkanize or destroy the Union.

@William Dalton

If you wish to take up the original claim to the “Tea Party”, I imagine you would have to deal with the heirs of the heroes of the Boston Tea Party.

But that is really irrelevant. What is relevant is that you Libertarians should get your stories straight when you masquerade:

I have “Clint”, a Libertarian, laying claim as an authentic “we” Tea Party member, circa 2010.

But then I have you denigrating those same circa 2010 Tea Partiers as, ” war-mongering pseudo small government conservatives who posed as “born again” lovers of liberty”.

I think it was Ronald Reagan who used to speak of the corruption of money in politics by saying, “Well, when people give my campaigns money, its because they signed on to my agenda; not the other was around.”

The problem with the Log Cabins, the Libertarians, and a few other “special interest” groups inside the GOP (including the neocons, who are basically Trotskyite Liberals, descendant from “Scoop” Jackson), is that they all want to co-opt the party to follow their agenda, not to follow a conservative agenda.

A simple desire to reduce your tax bill does not a “conservative” make. Libertarians, Log Cabins, Neocons would all be just as happy in with the Democrats provided their tax bills were cut and their agenda was advanced. If deficits didn’t matter (as is the neocon wont), they’re happy with “Big Government”. So are the Libertarians and Loggies, who would use the power of state government to roll back precedent and tradition and who have – in many states – actively opposed the majority of voters to promote their own agenda (whether it be cannabis or gay “marriage”.)

My advice to you is be careful. Just because somebody’s wearing your color jersey doesn’t mean their part of your team.

Bingo! You hit it straight on the head. Santorum was talking about personal and intergenerational mobility – the notion that your grandfather could be a coal miner, his son could be a doctor, and his son could be a US Senator – and that made a lot of the GOP establishment extremely nervous. (Never once during Romney’s “You didn’t build that” counter-campaign did he ever even mention the people that worked in those businesses and helped to make them successful; not once<.

The GOP has to get over this notion that the only class of Republican is the contributor/entrepreneur class. There are a lot of good and decent people that support GOP conservative notions who are not business owners and they have been sorely overlooked. What’s more, the enthusiastic over- embrace of entrepreneurs has caused the GOP to alienate a lot of people who would otherwise be with them, but resent their treatment because they don’t come to the party with tens of thousands of dollars to contribute to campaign coffers.

@Gerry
A more libertarian America would generally be a more socially conservative America; one without Roe v Wade. Libertarians distrust central government control, and this opposition extends to control of morality. The moral and economic system that would be best for Mississippi may not be the moral and economic system that would be best for New York. So no, libertarians are not modern day revolutionaries who only embrace state’s rights in some cynical political sense; they genuinely oppose central planning and state control as a matter of principle. Basically, what you are saying is that “traditional morality” must be maintained by an authoritarian central government, or else most areas of the country would naturally choose social liberalism; an assertion that is both wrong and extremely damaging to the cause of social conservatism. Do you honestly believe that the only thing keeping most states from legalizing polygamy and incest is that the federal government would not allow it?

I hear the supreme court might legalize gay marriage. As in, impose it on the entire country without the consent of most states or the electorate. I hate to break it to you, but statist authoritarianism runs both ways, and you are on the losing side this time. Well, I suppose you still have the draconian “war on drugs”, but given the demographics we’ll see how long that lasts.